Sighnaghi sits at 836 metres on a ridge at the south-eastern end of the Alazani valley, in Kakheti, the region that grows roughly seventy per cent of Georgia’s grapes. King Erekle II walled the town in 1762 and the walls are still there. From the top of the town you see the whole valley and, on a clear morning, the Greater Caucasus behind it.
I arrived at 09:00 in the second half of September, 110 kilometres and just under two hours from Tbilisi. Rtveli, the harvest, was under way: the whites were mostly in and the Saperavi still hanging. The air in Sighnaghi was 17 °C and would reach 26 by lunch. John Wurdeman met me on the street outside the Pheasant’s Tears tasting room with a coffee in each hand, one for me. He said we would start in Tibaani, where the qvevri are, while the cellar was busy.
A painter, a grower and a saying about pheasants#
John was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, grew up in Virginia, and took his master’s in painting at the Surikov Institute in Moscow. In 1991 he heard a recording of Georgian polyphonic singing and could not let it go. He came to Tbilisi in 1995, bought a house with a vineyard in Sighnaghi in 1996, learnt Georgian and started singing with traditional groups. He still does. He was later among the founders of Vino Underground, the Tbilisi natural wine bar, and of the Natural Wine Association in 2017.
Gela Patalishvili, the co-founder, is from a local family with generations in the vines. The two of them founded Pheasant’s Tears in 2007. The name comes from a Georgian saying: a wine has to be good enough to make a pheasant weep. It is a high bar to put on a label.
I met the wines first. Years ago someone poured me a Rkatsiteli at Vino Underground, and I remember the colour: not white, not orange, strong black tea with the light behind it.
Buried qvevri in Tibaani#
Tibaani is a village on the plain below Sighnaghi, and it has its own small PDO for amber Rkatsiteli made in qvevri. The Pheasant’s Tears cellar is here. The qvevri are buried to the neck in the floor under stone lids, the largest big enough to lose a person in. Buried clay holds a steady temperature without anyone touching a dial, and the egg shape sends skins and seeds down to a narrow point where they do the least damage.
The Kakhetian method, done fully, means whole crushed white grapes, skins, seeds and often the stems, into the qvevri, and six months there. Not every wine here gets the full six months. The Kisi does, and it comes out deep amber, smelling of apricot and honey. Others come off the skins after days or weeks; across the cellar the range runs from one day to six months. Everything is hand-picked, everything ferments on its own yeast, nothing is fined or filtered, and sulfur is kept low or left out, wine by wine.
The estate farms around seventeen hectares organically, not all of it in Kakheti: there are parcels in Kartli, Imereti, Samtskhe-Javakheti and Adjara, planted with the grapes of those places, Chinuri, Tavkveri and Shavkapito, Tsolikouri, Chkhaveri. There is also an experimental vineyard of rarities, varieties that came through the Soviet decades in a few rows of somebody’s yard.
Gela was on the crush pad when we came in, hosing down crates. We spoke about the Rkatsiteli, which had come in ten days before with good acidity, and about the stems, which he uses or does not use depending on how ripe they are. He answered every technical question I had and asked two harder ones back about Moravian Pálava.
Poliphonia, one hundred and seventeen voices#
Then John opened the wine I had come for. Poliphonia is a field blend from that experimental vineyard: the first releases counted 117 recognised indigenous varieties and some forty more still under study, picked and co-fermented in qvevri; later labels give a number above 150. It spends about ten days on the skins. It is a pale, restless wine, medium in body and high in acid, and it does not taste like any single grape because it is not one.
“In a good three-voice song none of the singers is the soloist,” John said, holding the glass up to the door. “That is what I wanted in the qvevri. A hundred grapes and no soloist.”
Georgian polyphony is three or more voices moving independently and landing together; UNESCO lists it, as it lists the qvevri method. John is also behind a Tbilisi restaurant of the same name.
One glass: Rkatsiteli#
We tasted six wines standing at a plank laid across two crates in the cellar doorway. The one I keep coming back to is the plainest.
The qvevri Saperavi was dark, fresh and lighter than its colour promised; the Kisi was the richest glass on the plank. Then the crush pad needed the plank back.
The table in Sighnaghi#
We drove back up to the restaurant in Sighnaghi, where I take groups to eat. The table was set in the courtyard: pkhali of spinach and of beetroot, each bound with walnut; badrijani, fried aubergine rolled around walnut paste; a Kakhetian tomato and cucumber salad with sunflower oil rather than olive; hot Imeruli khachapuri; then mtsvadi, pork grilled over vine cuttings, with tkemali, the sour plum sauce. The amber Rkatsiteli went with the walnut dishes as if designed for them, which over several centuries it was. The Saperavi went with the pork.
There was a tamada, a toastmaster, because in Kakheti there always is, and nobody drank before the toast. Toward the end two men from the cellar came in from the yard, John put down his fork, and the three of them sang a Kakhetian table song, unaccompanied, without anyone announcing it. Two minutes, then they sat down and finished their khachapuri. I have tried to arrange this for guests and learnt that you cannot; it happens or it does not.
Pheasant’s Tears on tour#
On my Kakheti qvevri tour we spend a full day here: the Tibaani cellar in the morning, by appointment, with five to seven wines; lunch at the restaurant in Sighnaghi; and the walls and Bodbe monastery in the afternoon, when the light is best over the valley. The team speaks English, French and Russian. On the western route through Imereti and Racha this cellar is the reference point: once you have tasted six months on skins in Kakheti, you understand what the Imeretians mean by a fifth of the skins for a few weeks. For why these wines look the way they do, start with my piece on orange wine and skin contact.
Book the cellar a day or two ahead. During rtveli, expect to be handed a crate.
I drove back down toward the Alazani in the late afternoon with a bottle of Poliphonia on the seat beside me, a hundred and some grapes I could not name, and one song I could not get out of my head. John would say those are the same thing.
